In this project, we tackle the problem of automatic misconfiguration diagnosis in a scalable, low-overhead, and privacy-preserving way. This project is a subproject of the Strider project.

PeerPressure

Technical support contributes 17% of the total cost of ownership of today’s desktop PCs. An important element of technical support is troubleshooting misconﬁgured applications. Misconﬁguration troubleshooting is particularly challenging, because conﬁguration information is shared and altered by multiple applications.

In this work, we present a novel troubleshooting system: PeerPressure, which uses statistics from a set of sample machines to diagnose the root-cause misconﬁgurations on a sick machine. This is in contrast with methods that require manual identiﬁcation on a healthy machine for diagnosing misconﬁgurations [30]. The elimination of this manual operation makes a signiﬁcant step towards automated misconﬁguration troubleshooting.

Friends Troubleshooting Network (FTN)

Content sharing is a popular use of peer-to-peer systems because of their inherent scalability and low cost of maintenance. We leverage this nature of peer-to-peer systems to gather configuration samples needed by the PeerPressure troubleshooter (see above). The key challenges are preserving privacy of individual configuration data and ensuring the integrity of peer contributions. To this end, we construct the Friends Troubleshooting Network (FTN), a peer-to-peer overlay network, where the links between peer machines reflect the friendship of their owners. Our FTN manifests recursive trust rather than transitive trust. To achieve privacy, we use the general scheme of a source-less and destination-less random-walk for routing, during which search is carried out simultaneously with secure parameter aggregation for the purpose of troubleshooting. Our design has been guided by the characteristics of a real-world friends network, the MSN Instant Messenger (IM) network. We have prototyped our FTN system and analyzed the tradeoff between privacy and protocol efficiency.